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The Week in 15 Photos: Santa Barbara, Maya Angelou, and a Transgender Army Vet’s Big Win

by DustyPocock Posted on May 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It was a week of mourning and upheaval around the world, beginning with the mass shooting that killed six and injured 13 at University of California, Santa Barbara. A few days later, the nation said farewell to poet Maya Angelou, and at week’s end, VA head Eric Shinseki resigned amid outrage over his agency’s secret healthcare backlogs. Half a world away, turbulent elections in Ukraine fueled political uncertainty and renewed fighting, while in the European Union’s parliamentary elections, far-right parties made unprecedented gains. Here are 15 of the most remarkable photos that captured the week’s events.

Students walk into the sunset after Wednesday’s oceanside memorial to the victims of the Santa Barbara mass shooting. The News-Press/Peter Vandenbelt/AP Photo

Maya Angelou passed away on Wednesday at age 86; just seven weeks earlier, she’d attended her own portrait’s unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Paul Morigi/AP Images for National Portrait Gallery

Students in Paris protest the results of the European elections, where the National Front party won a quarter of France’s vote. Lewis Joly/Visual/ZUMA Press

Denee Mallon, a 74-year-old Army veteran, at Albuquerque’s Trans March Thursday; the next day, a government review board granted Mallon’s request to have Medicare pay for her gender reassignment surgery. Craig Fritz/AP Photo

Supporters of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Egypt’s former military chief, celebrate his victory in the country’s presidential election, plagued by low turnout and boycotts, on Cairo’s Tahrir Square Thursday. Amr Nabil/AP Photo

A demonstrator protests Thailand’s military coup in Bangkok on Wednesday. Wason Wanichakorn/AP Photo

Glaziers work on the coating of a ledge that juts out from the 103rd floor of Chicago’s Willis Tower on Thursday. One such coating cracked Wednesday night when a family was standing on it. M. Spencer Green/AP Photo

Pope Francis visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday. Amos Ben Gersho/APA Images/ZUMA Press

The Soyuz TMA-13M spaceship takes off at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday, carrying a new crew to the International Space Station. Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Photo

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki speaks to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans on Friday, a few hours before tendering his resignation. Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

President Barack Obama hugs White House press secretary Jay Carney after announcing that Carney will step down next month. Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Ansun Sujoe, 13, of Fort Worth, Texas, left, and Sriram Hathwar, 14, of Painted Post, New York, celebrate after being named co-champions of the National Spelling Bee on Thursday. Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Tara Cowan demonstrates with other members of Open Carry Texas on Thursday; gun rights advocates are suing the city of Arlington over a ban on distributing leaflets at high-traffic intersections and roads. Tony Gutierrez/AP Photo

Ukrainian President-elect Pyotr Poroshenko, left, with Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko, announcing that he won’t curb the use of force in battling the pro-Russian insurgency. Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo

Coffins for members of the Vostok Batallion, a pro-Russian militia, who died in clashes at Ukraine’s Donetsk airport. At least 30 bodies were sent to Russia for burial, raising further suspicions of Russia’s involvement in the conflict. Sandro Maddalena/NurPhoto/Sipa USA/AP Photo

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The Week in 15 Photos: Santa Barbara, Maya Angelou, and a Transgender Army Vet’s Big Win

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America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

by MargotBugden Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why are there more moderate Democrats than moderate Republicans? This has never been because Democrats are spineless wimps who won’t stand up for liberal values. The main reason is simple: there aren’t very many self-identified liberals in America. There never have been. Self-IDed conservatives have outnumbered self-IDed liberals by 10-15 percentage points for decades. This means that Democrats are forced to appeal more to the center than Republicans are.

But Gallup reports that this is changing. On social issues, the ID gap has narrowed to nearly zero. On economic issues conservatives still have a healthy 21 percentage point lead, but that’s way down from 2010. Here’s the chart:

In one sense, you should take this with a grain of salt. Sure, there are now more self-IDed liberals, but that’s compared to 2010, a high-water mark for conservative identification.

In another sense, this is pretty unusual. Normally, the country gets steadily more liberal during Republican presidencies and steadily more conservative during Democratic presidencies. This is, presumably, because voters get increasingly tired of whoever’s in power and more open to the idea that the other guys might have better answers. But this time that hasn’t happened. There’s too much noise in the Gallup chart to draw any definitive conclusions, but if you compare the numbers now to the average from the last few years of the Bush presidency, the country has actually gotten a bit more liberal. That’s something that rarely happens six years into a Democratic presidency.

The trend is more noticeable on social issues, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. On gay rights in particular, the country has plainly moved in the direction of more tolerance, and conservatives are just flatly out of step. As this trend continues—and it’s inexorable at this point—the conservative position strikes more and more people as not merely misguided, but just plain ugly. And you don’t self-ID with an ideology that you think is ugly.

It’s a funny thing. People say they don’t like President Obama’s foreign policy, but it turns out they approve of the specific things he’s doing. They say they don’t like Obamacare, but they like the things Obamacare does. They say they don’t like Obama’s economic policy, but they largely approve of his actual positions. You see this over and over. It doesn’t look like Obama is doing much to move the country in a more liberal direction, but in his slow, methodical, pragmatic way, he’s doing just that. A lot of people might not know it, but they’re attracted by his no-drama approach to incremental social change. It frustrates those of us who want to see things change faster, but in the end, it might turn out to be pretty effective.

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America Is Becoming a Bit More Liberal. That’s Pretty Unusual Six Years Into a Democratic Presidency.

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Who’s Watching the National Spelling Bee Tonight?

by EmmaY68hrsarhc Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m just curious: Am I the only one who thinks the National Spelling Bee jumped the shark years ago? The escalating ridiculousness of the words, the World Series-esque television coverage, and the inexplicable geek chic surrounding the event have made the whole thing kind of nuts.

Besides, we all have spell check these days, right?

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Who’s Watching the National Spelling Bee Tonight?

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Two Brief Notes About the VA Scandal

by ForrestWalter Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

I have a couple of things related to the VA scandal that I wish everyone would get straight on:

There is a difference between (a) the backlog in initial applications for VA benefits and (b) wait times for appointments at VA hospitals. They are completely different things with completely different roots. Don’t slide confusingly between the two in a single story.
You should always try to compare the performance of the VA to private sector care. Saying that the average wait time for non-urgent appointments is 23 days tells us nothing. Is that longer or shorter than it is elsewhere? Ditto for treatment mistakes, breadth of service, availability of pharmaceuticals, etc. All large organizations have large numbers of problems. That’s inevitable. The only way to judge them properly is to compare them to other large organizations doing the same thing.

That’s all for now. I might have more later.

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Two Brief Notes About the VA Scandal

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

by EricUmifqgovmol Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

For-profit colleges—aka trade schools—have a terrible track record. On average, their students rack up tons of debt and very few of them ever graduate. So why is it so hard to do something about them? Henry Farrell asks Suzanne Mettler about the politics of these schools:

Democrats worried about poverty used to defend for-profit colleges against fiscally conservative Republicans. Now Republicans (together with a few Democrats) are defending for-profit colleges against Democrats and reformers. Why did the partisan politics of for-profit education change so dramatically over a couple of decades?

During the Reagan Administration, Secretary of Education William Bennett criticized the for-profits as “diploma mills designed to trick the poor into taking on federally-backed debt,” and in 1990, Sens. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm introduced legislation to regulate them. Since the mid-1990s, however, GOP critics vanished after some party leaders began to champion the for-profits as a private-sector alternative to the higher education establishment. Given the dynamics of rising partisan polarization, the rank-and-file quickly fell in line. Some Democrats now seek to represent constituents who have been taken advantage of by such schools and incurred unpayable debts, but others continue to defend them.

Lovely, isn’t it? Democrats were finally ready to concede a point to Republicans, but apparently the horror of bipartisan agreement was too much for them. Still, I suppose there was never any real prospect of agreement anyway. I imagine that Republicans merely wanted to axe federal funding and let it go at that, while Democrats probably wanted to make for-profit schools perform better. The fundamental chasm between wanting to help poor people and not caring about poor people was undoubtedly never in any danger of being bridged.

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

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The Scorecard in Ukraine Is Murkier Than Most Pundits Think

by VirginiaGwl Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Doyle McManus says that Vladimir Putin has played a shrewd game in Ukraine:

Here’s the score card: Putin has pocketed Crimea, the first territory in Europe to be seized by force since World War II. (On paper, the United States and the European Union are still demanding that he give the peninsula back to Ukraine, but in private, their leaders concede that’s unlikely to happen.) He has forced the European Union to put the brakes on Ukraine’s progress toward membership in the Western economic club. He has kept most of Russia’s business with the West intact and signed a big new natural gas deal with China. Now all he has to do is wait for Western attention to Ukraine’s travails to wane, as it probably will.

….”Even Petro Poroshenko is saying it’s time for normalization with Moscow,” she noted. “He knows who’s going to call the shots over Ukraine’s future: not Brussels, not Washington. It’s Moscow.”

This isn’t a ridiculous read of the situation, but I think it’s missing something key: compared to what? Sure, Putin might have found a way to salvage his disastrous intervention in Ukraine, but the right way to look at this is to compare Russia’s situation now to its situation in, say, October of last year. It’s true that Putin scuttled Ukraine’s free-trade deal with the EU, but look at the fallout. In order to turn things around after his incompetent diplomatic efforts failed, Putin was forced to intervene so clumsily that it inspired the Maidan protests that ended up causing Ukraine’s president to flee. He massed troops on Ukraine’s borders and used Russian special forces—again, disguised so clumsily that no one was fooled for even a second—to try to force a secession of the east. When that failed, Putin was forced to back down. He can pretend that he never had any intention of using military force in the first place, but no one takes that seriously and he knows it. His threat failed because the Russian military is weak and the American/EU sanctions had already begun to bite. He was hoping for a bloodless takeover, but he miscalculated badly and failed to get it.

So what’s the scorecard? On the plus side, Putin has Crimea. Maybe all by itself that was worth it—and if he’d been smart enough to stop there he might have come out ahead. But on the downside, Putin has demonstrated once again that Russia isn’t a reliable supplier of natural gas and will use it as a club whenever it feels like it. He’s earned the enmity of most of his neighbors. He’s gained nothing in Ukraine except the end of the EU association agreement, which was never a huge threat in the first place and will probably end up being implemented piecemeal over the next few years anyway. He’s damaged the Russian economy and set back relations with Europe. And sure, Poroshenko is saying it’s time for normalization with Moscow, but Putin had that back when Viktor Yanukovych was president.

So….Crimea. And possibly a slowdown in the pace of Ukraine’s integration with the West. That’s about it. But I wouldn’t underestimate the cost of this to Putin. Threats of military force are flashy, but unless you’re willing to back them up regularly, they do a lot more harm than good. I’m not sure why so many people who are generally clear-sighted about the drawbacks of military action suddenly get so smitten by it when it’s wielded by a thug like Putin. Hell, he doesn’t even use it well.

When the dust settles, it’s hard to see Putin gaining much from all this in the places that count. Regardless of the brave face they put on it, I’ll bet there aren’t many people in the inner sanctums of the Kremlin who think of the past six months as much of a triumph for Russia.

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The Scorecard in Ukraine Is Murkier Than Most Pundits Think

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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago

by IsabelM62ik Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff says today’s teenagers are “the best-behaved generation on record”:

The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans’ health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.

The teen birth rate is at an all-time low….High school seniors are drinking less, smoking less, and barely using cocaine….

And, of course, the rate of violent crime has plummeted among teenagers, as Dick Mendel documents here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d suggest that all of this is at least partially the result of the end of leaded gasoline in America.

What’s happening today isn’t an aberration. Teenagers from the mid-60s through the mid-90s were the aberration. We managed to convince ourselves during that era that something had gone permanently wrong, but it wasn’t so. The ultra-violent gangs and reckless behavior that became so widespread simply wasn’t normal, any more than expecting teenagers to sit around in kumbaya circles would be normal. Nor had anything gone fundamentally wrong with our culture. It was the result of defective brain development caused by early exposure to lead.

I’ll never be able to prove this. No one ever will. The data is simply not rich enough, and it never will be. Nevertheless, what evidence we do have sure points in this direction. And here’s why it’s important. Even if we never clean up another microgram of lead, we’ve nonetheless cleaned up most of the lead that we poisoned our atmosphere with in the postwar years. So if the lead hypothesis is true, it means that our default fear of teenagers—beaten into us during the scary lead years—is no longer accurate. They simply aren’t as dangerous or as reckless as they used to be, and that isn’t going to change. We don’t need to be as frightened of them as we used to be. In the same way that we have to get over economic fears rooted in the 70s or the Great Depression that are no longer meaningful, we need to get over our widespread fear of teenagers that’s no longer meaningful either.

Today’s teenagers have grown up with more or less normal brain development. Some will be nice kids, some will become gang leaders. That’s always the case. But speaking generally, if you meet a group of teenagers today, they’re no more likely to be especially scary than they were in the 40s or 50s. They’re just teenagers. It’s probably going to take a while for everyone to adjust to this, but the time to start is now. Decently behaved teenagers are here to stay.

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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago

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Patent Court Judge Steps Down After Cozy Relationship to Patent Attorney Becomes Public

by JanetteRichmond Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim Lee writes about a recent scandal at the federal circuit court that specializes in patent cases:

Last week Judge Randal Rader, the court’s chief judge, admitted that he wrote an effusive email to patent attorney Edward Reines. The email praised the attorney’s work and encouraged him to share the email with potential clients, a breach of judicial impartiality. The revelation has forced Rader step down as the court’s chief effective this Thursday. Rader plans to stay on the court as a circuit judge. The Federal Circuit was also forced to re-consider two cases involving Reines after Rader retroactively recused himself from them.

Rader’s indiscretion is the last straw for Jeff John Roberts of GigaOm (no relation to the chief justice, as far as I know), who writes: “the Federal Circuit looks beyond salvaging. It’s time for Congress to disband the court.”

The problem with the patent court is that it seems to have suffered the equivalent of regulatory capture. I don’t know the backgrounds of the judges on the court, but they’re awfully prone to upholding patent claims. They’re sympathetic in terms of broad legal interpretations, widening the scope of software patents far beyond what Supreme Court precedent requires (or even suggests), and they’re sympathetic in terms of specific cases, where they rule in favor of plaintiffs well over half the time (see chart on right).

I don’t know if getting rid of the patent court and simply allowing patent cases to be heard by ordinary circuit courts is the right answer. That’s how patent cases used to be heard, but there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Besides, that would require congressional action, and what are the odds of that? What’s more, if Congress did rouse itself to do something about this, a better course of action would be legislation that explicitly reins in the scope of software patents and does more to make patent trolling less lucrative. That would be the right thing to do. We can keep hoping, anyway.

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Patent Court Judge Steps Down After Cozy Relationship to Patent Attorney Becomes Public

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Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

by JanessaChubb Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a quick follow-up to my post last week about the decline in new business startups over the past few decades. Does this suggest that America is getting less entrepreneurial? In one way, yes: some of it is probably due to big national chains making it harder to start small family businesses, and some of it is probably due to an aging population. Economically, however, the triumph of gigantic chain stores isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the aging of the baby boomers should be thought of as a separate demographic issue, not a business startup issue.

Still, economists all agree that the key to a healthy economy is young, growing companies (not small businesses pe se). So how are we doing on that score? Over at Slate, Jordan Weissman points to a study by Paul Kedrosky that tries to quantify the number of startups that grow to $100 million or more in a fairly short period. The chart on the right shows his results. There’s a spike during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, and a dropoff during the Great Recession—a period too recent to have yet produced very many $100 million companies anyway—but there’s basically no secular decline at all. Roughly speaking, America has been producing about 150 small, fast-growing companies per year for the past three decades.

This is just a single data point, and Kedrosky warns that his data is necessarily pretty rough. But it does suggest that although America might be producing fewer new coffee shops and boutique clothing stores, it’s not necessarily losing its inventive edge.

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Raw Data: America Is Still Producing Lots of Inventive Young Companies

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When Republicans Start Their Race to the Bottom, It Can Only Mean Primary Season Is Approaching

by RodrigoReinhard Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Marco Rubio has announced that he thinks climate change is nonsense. Rand Paul has hastily backed off his heresy over voter ID laws. Bobby Jindal gave the commencement address at Liberty University this weekend. Rick Santorum is flogging a new book, Blue Collar Conservatives. Chris Christie is agonizing over whether to piss off gun owners by signing a bill that would ban magazines holding more than ten rounds. Mike Huckabee has ditched his amiable persona and is demanding impeachment of a judge who struck down a gay marriage ban in Arkansas.

I guess primary season must be approaching. The fight for the fever swamp vote is now in full swing.

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When Republicans Start Their Race to the Bottom, It Can Only Mean Primary Season Is Approaching

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